"You can’t just lecture people and expect them to change their behavior."Plus, expecting others to conform to our wishes is not a recommended path to peace, love, and happiness. Full post (about financial literacy) whence the quote was taken, is here.

"Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach."-Horace Mann (1841)

...........................I wish they taught in college. Full list is here. Two of the seventeen here:A survey of biases: Students read an old State of the Union address given by a president they disagree with, but told the speech came from a president they admire. After the student glows about how wise the speech is, the true speaker is revealed and the student instantly finds parts of the speech they dislike.Sometimes life isn't fair 101: Twenty percent of the class's homework is randomly deleted. The other 80% get scholarships for no obvious reason.I actually had the good fortune to have several professors who taught some of these subjects, even though they called them something else. As they say at Faber College, Knowledge Is Good.thanks craig

"The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It is certainly true that, more than any previous Cold War president, Jimmy Carter challenged global containment: the doctrine that, in order to safeguard the United States, America must oppose every communist advance anywhere in the globe. That doctrine, first proposed by Harry Truman as a way to justify aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947, had by the 1970s turned catastrophic in Vietnam. In that war, the United States lost 58,000 service members, killed millions of Vietnamese, spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and wrecked America's image overseas. All on the theory that if one backward former French colony thousands of miles away went communist, the global system of alliances on which American security depended would collapse.

Carter's move away from global containment rested on two basic premises: his respect for nationalism and his optimism about democracy.

The philosopher and Web pundit David Weinberger makes a particularly eloquent case for preserving the ontological chaos, arguing that human knowledge is inherently fluid and that attempts at orchestrating it are doomed to failure. Celebrating the "new principles of digital disorder," Weinberger argues that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." He further argues in favor of making as much information as possible freely available, without trying to exert quality controls. Instead, users should have open access to everything and choose whatever seems useful. "Filter on the way out, not on the way in," he writes, predicting the emergence of what he calls a "third order" of knowledge, one not constrained by the physical limitations of paper, nor encumbered by layers of institutional gatekeepers. Instead, he argues for a maximalist approach: collect everything and sort it out later, since the online world provides "an abundance of access to an abundance of resources." Pointing to examples like Wikipedia and Flickr, Weinberger argues that the old order of knowledge - the Aristotelian notion that knowledge was shaped like a tree - has fallen by the wayside and that the free-form structure of today's Web provides a more accurate description of culture, on that "better represents the wild diversity of human interests and thought.-Alex Wright, as excerpted fromCataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

"American politics remains one of the most complicated systems on Planet Earth, and independent minded citizens of this country can and will surprise even the shrewdest of analysts with their creative responses to the changing challenges and conditions they face."-Full Walter Russell Mead essay from whence this was extracted is here

"Cub history before Banks seems archaic, cold. You can admire the statistics of Hack Wilson, or groove on that three-note poem Tinker to Evers to Chance, but that's black and white, whereas Ernie is Technicolor. Failing with him was not always fun; failing without him would've been intolerable. His philosophical position was existentialist. He seemed to say, Yes, you will lose, yes, you will die, but it's a beautiful day, a wonderful park. His great saying, "Let's play two," is as defiantly hopeful as anything by Sinatra." -as excerpted from Rich Cohen's Ode to Joy in the 2/2/15 Sports Illustrated issue
More on Ernie Banks here. Growing up in the '50's and '60's, well, things were simpler back then. The Phillies would be bad, but the Cubs would be worse. (At least that's how I remember it. No fair looking up the actual standings and proving me wrong.) It was one of those strange things. They had great players in Banks, Billy Williams, and Ron Santo and were always fun to watch, but something always seemed to happen.

"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."-Vannevar Bush, anticipating the Intertunnel, as excerpted from his 1945 essayAs We May Think

I was born on April 16, 1889, at eight o'clock at night, in East Lane, Walworth. Soon after, we moved to West Square, St. George's Road, Lambeth. According to Mother, my world was a happy one. Our circumstances were moderately comfortable; we lived in three tastefully decorated rooms. One of my early recollections was that each night before Mother went to the theatre Sydney and I were lovingly tucked up in a comfortable bed and left in the care of the housemaid. In my world of three and a half years, all things were possible; if Sydney, who was four years older than I, could perform legerdemain and swallow a coin and make it come out through the back of my head, I could do the same; so I swallowed a halfpenny and Mother was obliged to send for a doctor.
-Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography

Ed. Note: My Sweetie and I ventured out last Friday to a showing of Chaplin's 1921 silent movie, "The Kid." The draw was that the movie would be accompanied by an organist, just like in the old days. The organist was superb (playing the music as written by Chaplin his ownself) and the film a revelation. A wonderful night out.

Explanation: These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as the "Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years. NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The above picture was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2002. These galactic mice will probably collide again and again over the next billion years until they coalesce to form a single galaxy.Source and larger image here

I thought long and hard about joining in with players across the league and making a visual statement—a T-shirt or a hands-up gesture—but ultimately I decided against it. I asked myself, What message am I sending out? Am I going to end police violence? Racism? No, of course not. So how can I evoke change?

I got some news nine months ago that helped me reach a conclusion. My girlfriend, Ashley, and I are expecting our first child, a boy, any day now. I’ve realized in the last year that I can evoke change by being a great role model: a man who respects women and police officers, who graduated from college and does everything in his power to be successful within the rules.

Circumstances dictate where you start—a single mother raised Kam Chancellor to become the man he is today—but each individual determines his course. Where I came from, in Compton, kids were brainwashed into thinking that if they weren’t athletes or rappers or drug dealers they were nothing. My son will understand that he’s in control of his own destiny and that education, work ethic and discipline will guide him to an even better life than I’ve enjoyed. He’ll be the man who makes this world a better place through positive actions and influence.

"I’m bothered by the continued creep of safety concerns being used to restrict individual movements. Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but citizens used to be deemed competent to make prudent choices."-as excerpted from here

“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”-Charlie Chaplin